Excerpt from Natural History, Vol. 22: The Journal of the American Museum of Natural History Even among the lowest, but not physiologically the simplest, of living organisms, the bacteria, we find some species that can produce light. Such bacteria live mostly, almost exclusively, in the sea and more than fifty species have been described by investigators. Practically any single gallon of water that one draws from the ocean contains one or more of them and they are present in larger numbers in the slime on the surfaces and in the various body cavities of almost all animals that live in salt water. But although these generally distributed individuals are in normal health and are multiplying and absorb ing food, they do not produce light and shine under circumstances such as these. It is only when they are suddenly given a supply of rich food by being placed, for instance, on the dead body of a fish or other animal, and have multiplied into masses containing millions of individuals, that they begin to emit the beautiful greenish yellow or greenish blue light that is characteristic of them. The up per figure on p. 6 shows two agar plates on which colonies of these microscopic creatures have formed masses of a trans parent, jelly-like slime. Sufficient light was present to photograph the old skull placed between them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.